Gerry van Klinken

East Timor history is a forbidden history. We only know the celebration of July 17 as Integration Day to Indonesia, but it was never explained how the integration came about. Most of the students would find it out by themselves and ended up hating the Indonesian government and Indonesian military. (Antero Benedito da Silva, East Timorese student leader who was awarded the International Student Peace Prize in Trondheim, Norway, in March 1999, for his non-violent struggle on behalf of a democratic East Timor)

When President Habibie announced in late January 1999 that an independence ballot would be held in East Timor, teachers there panicked. The teachers association pleaded with Jakarta to transfer the largely non-East Timorese teachers out, saying they were being constantly harrassed. 'Their presence is rejected by the bulk of society', the association said. Soon after, money was made available to move thousands of them out.

East Timor was not the only place in Indonesia where school history lessons merely engendered hate. In Papua, formerly known as Irian Jaya, history teachers in remote highland postings in February 2000 found themselves fleeing to the safety of town after parents threatened them for teaching a version of national history in which Papuans had no role.

Nor was the post-authoritarian revolt against official versions of history confined to Indonesia's 'colonial' periphery. In West Kalimantan, a teacher confessed: 'To be honest, our students often accuse us of lying to them, for example about the communist party and the 11 March letter of 1966 (in which General Suharto obtained wide-ranging emergency powers from President Sukarno). It hurts, but it's an occupational hazard. We're just sticking to what the government has laid down'.

Under pressure of this kind, interim President Habibie's Education Minister Juwono Sudarsono announced in October 1998 that he had formed a team to review the school history text books and produce a more 'balanced' curriculum. But these things move slowly. The new version was not due out until July 2000, more than two years after Suharto's resignation. In the meantime, history teachers were told they could present any of several versions of the most controversial episodes in the national curriculum - all of them concerned Suharto's role in history.

'History', in what follows, is not the stuff of specialised academic journals. It is the stories about the nation's past that everyone can read in school texts, in newspapers and books, or see on films and television, and then discuss. History is an important part of a nation's identity and ought to be written 'from below'. But often, in the Gramscian fashion, it is written and then socialised by powerful elites 'from above'. In the two years since Indonesia's authoritarian New Order ended, the given conceptions of history have come under serious challenge. New versions of history, long suppressed, have begun to circulate and are vying for adherents.

A battle for history is under way in post-Suharto Indonesia that is interesting to observe for several reasons. It helps us understand how social knowledge is shaped in a Third World country experiencing post-authoritarian transition. It gives us a window on what nationalism, that powerful force in the twentieth century, still means at the turn of the twenty-first. And it may just give us a glimpse of the future of the country itself.

Unfortunately the only comprehensive account of Indonesian historiography, by Klooster, fails to take account of its one central fact - the grip of power even over academic historians. Indonesians have never had their own national history. It has always been presented to them from above as a 'legacy', as a mythological given merely requiring assent. In spirit reproducing the Javanese court chronicles that recount a victor's history of great men, in form resembling the propaganda of Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China, Suharto's New Order history text books were mind-numbingly dull accounts liberally sprinkled with bad photographs of soldiers, the dead bodies of 'traitors', and rows of grim men at diplomatic conferences.

Before Suharto, during the first two decades after the declaration of independence in August 1945, Indonesian history-writers were preoccupied with 'nation-building'. In the manner of nationalists everywhere, this meant appropriating thousands of years of pre-modern history for the modern Indonesian nation-state. So all the great kingdoms of the past, no matter how despotic, were precursors of the Indonesian nation, while all those who rebelled against the colonial Dutch, for whatever parochial reason, became heroes of the independence struggle.

During its second period under General Suharto, from October 1965 until May 1998, the assumption that history is a didactic instrument of the state was pursued in a more factional direction. History-writing was now less motivated by nation-building in any inclusive, integrative sense than by regime-building, in which images of chaos were attached to domestic groups to which the military-dominated New Order objected. This factional approach relied on loyalty and quiescence in its readers, rather than on morepositive qualities such as pride and participation. It was to this often brazenly deceitful factionalism, rather than to the perhaps unimaginative general nationalism, that school students and their parents reacted with anger once the regime collapsed.

Film is a more invasive medium than school history text books, and here too New Order historical myth-making was an active player. Early in the New Order, fawning film-makers produced not one but two films depicting Suharto's heroic role in a historical episode of Indonesia's war for independence in 1945-49. Janur kuning ('Young coconut leaf', directed by Alam Soeryajaya in **) and Serangan fajar ('Dawn attack', directed by Arifin C Noer in **) portrayed then Lt-Col Suharto as playing the key role in a republican attack on the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta on 1 March 1949. The city had been the capital of the Republic of Indonesia, but Dutch troops wiped out this last vestige of republican territory when they seized it in December 1948. When republican troops managed to re-occupy it, albeit briefly, they helped turn the tide of world opinion, and this led by the end of 1949 to international recognition of Indonesia's independence. By placing the military, and in particular himself, at the centre of this event (which actually had many non-military players as well), Suharto's admirers were inferring that he personally had brought the nation to birth.

The message was reinforced in not one but two hugeYogyakarta monuments - one to commemmorate the 1 March 1949 attack, and one to commemmorate the return of Yogyakarta to its former glory as the republican capital four months later.

Another regime-building film in which Suharto played the central role was Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI ('The treachery of the 30 September Movement / Indonesian Communist Party', directed by Arifin C Noer in 1981). This bloodthirsty account of the way Suharto came to power in the days following the coup attempt on 30 September 1965 made much of an alleged connection between coup plotters within the military and the communist party PKI. Communist women were portrayed as frenzied killers in the scene at Lubang Buaya, in Jakarta's air force base, when several generals were murdered. Every 1 October for nearly two decades, this film was compulsory viewing for all Indonesians. All television stations broadcast it in prime time, and whole classes of school children were taken to see it at the local cinema (at their own expense).

Like the 1949 event, the 1965 event too was immortalised in massive monuments and gruesome museum dioramas - the latter routinely included in school history tours. Every 1 October the president led a solemn ceremony in front of the monument commemmorating the cruelly murdered generals at Lubang Buaya. The day was named Hari Kesaktian Pancasila, in honour of the 'sacred inviolability' of the national ideology Pancasila. On this day, evidently, the gods intervened in the nick of time to save the nation from communism, using Suharto and the army as his humble instrument. Nothing was ever said about the murders of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists that followed the 1965 event.

The first of October was merely one of the sacred dates in which the New Order actualised what the respected Indonesian historian Taufik Abdullah afterwards liked to call its 'hegemonic knowledge'. On 11 March Indonesian newspapers invariably carried 'eyewitness accounts' of the fearfully chaotic atmosphere in 1966 during which General Suharto sent emissaries to receive President Sukarno's authorisation signing over most of his powers to Suharto to restore order. On 5 October, armed forces day, large military parades reminded Indonesians who was in charge.

Such a factional yet hegemonic historical account could not fail to be challenged. But the New Order always responded harshly to such challenges. New York-based Human Rights Watch estimated that over 2,000 books were banned over three decades. The report discusses twelve historical titles banned in the last decade alone. Most dealt with the events of 1965-66, but others took up the regional revolts of 1957-58 and the role of Indonesians of Chinese descent. Mostly the attorney-general said the banned works 'inverted the facts', which could 'lead the public astray' and ultimately 'disturb public order'.

The two years since Suharto was forced to resign on 21 May 1998 have seen a flurry of historical debate. Its hegemonic knowledge shaken, the state has responded by agreeing to withdraw some of the more blatant Suhartoist deceits from the official history- without at the same time agreeing that communists were victims of a great injustice, and certainly without severing the state's claim to be the arbiter of history. A much freer publishing environment has produced a fascinating variety of previously disallowed historical accounts from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

More interesting still, elites in the restive regions are developing historical accounts that often turn Indonesian nationalism on its head. They place Indonesia, instead of the Netherlands, in the role of colonial master.

In as much as these histories reflect a political identity with which Indonesians identify, that identity is becoming more problematic on the national level, more militant on the local level, and sometimes - though not nearly often enough - more honest on the human level. First to openly challenge the Suhartoist historical hegemony upon his resignation were elites who had been close to power under Sukarno and who now hoped to benefit from the reversal of fortunes. Their familiarity with the nationalist preoccupations of sacred dates, great men, and legal milestones hardly set them apart from their New Order rivals on matters of principle.

On 1 June 1998, not yet two weeks after Suharto resigned, Megawati Sukarnoputri joined a group of retired military officers, a Sukarno-era foreign minister, and even some serving Foreign Affairs Department officials in a commemmoration of the date in 1945 on which her father Sukarno had announced Pancasila. Its close association with Suharto's predecessor had ensured that the date was not celebrated during the New Order. Suharto preferred to link Pancasila with his own intervention on 1 October 1965.

Perhaps intending to hasten a smooth transition to her own rise to power, Megawati's main message on that day was for young demonstrators to 'stop criticising Suharto'. However, a Sukarnoist revival never happened. Megawati only made it as far as the largely ceremonial vice-presidency, and 1 June has since then remained of little interest. Habibie's Education Minister Juwono Sudarsono apparently felt confident enough to say in October 1999 that the 1 October day should be retained because 'Pancasila is indeed sacred'.

Next, student demonstrators teamed up with some old Sukarnoist soldiers to challenge Supersemar, the 11 March 1966 letter General Suharto wrung from President Sukarno to obtain his coveted emergency powers. Although the original has never been seen in public, the New Order always quoted this letter as its real legal basis. This challenge fared little better than the 1 June commemmoration, no doubt because it took on the still-powerful military as much as it did Suharto. In July 1998 the military fraction in parliament told them that 'straightening out the historical record' should be limited to discovering the missing Supersemar document. In October and November 1998 the main rebel eyewitness, a former soldier who said he saw Suharto's emissaries draw a pistol on Sukarno to make him sign, was interrogated no less than four times by the police.

However, the reformers had more success with their assault on the Suhartoist version of the 1 March 1949 'dawn attack' on Yogyakarta. The event lay in the distant past, and more importantly the official version had deeply offended the Sultan of Yogyakarta, who had played an important role in conceptualising the diplomatic importance of the attack but had been written out of the story. That sultan had since passed away, but his son had taken over as governor of the Yogyakarta Special District and was moreover an important figure in the 'reformasi' politics of 1998.

In September 1998 retired General Nasution, who was more senior than Suharto in the 1945-49 revolution but who found himself sidelined by Suharto in 1965, said Suharto never fired a rifle during the Yogyakarta attack, as the sycophantic film Janur kuning had claimed. He was in fact sheltering with the sultan. By the time the 1 March anniversary came around in 1999, the remark had swelled into a storm of contempt. Some old guerrillas who had fought for Suharto tried their best to maintain their commander's prestige, but in the end they were forced to move their commemmoration to a secret location for fear of disruption. The New Order spell, if there ever was one, had on this issue at least been broken. By March of the following year, it was alright for state radio RRI to broadcast a panel discussion of the event that completely discredited Suharto. In his stead, the prestige of the Yogyakarta sultanate had risen considerably.

Another once powerful group who felt insulted by the Suhartoist version of history was the air force. Under the pretext, depicted graphically in the film Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI, that the air force had been pro-communist because leftist militias were training on the Halim air force base in Jakarta and the generals were killed there on the night of 30 September 1965, Suharto had removed the air force from all positions of influence. New Order military dominance was more accurately army dominance, and the navy, police and air force resented it deeply.

Former air force chief of staff Air Marshall Omar Dani was among the longest-held political prisoners of the New Order. Held since soon after the 1 October 1965 event, he was not released until President Habibie pardoned him six months after Suharto resigned. He promised to publish his memoirs. His successor as air force chief of staff, Air Marshall Sri Mulyono Herlambang, was also detained for a while in the 1960s but mostly remained free and farmed chickens for a living. In October 1998 he formed an association of retired air force officers and promised to bring out a book that would 'straighten out the historical record' and clear the air force's reputation of its alleged communism. A year later, to considerable publicity, he fulfilled his promise. The book's main message was that the 1965 event should be traced to rivalry between the services (in which the army was the bad guy), and not to ideological conflict within society.

Similar messages accusing Suharto of having sacrificed brothers-in-arms under the cloak of a generalised ideological civil war he himself had helped instigate could be read in books published by an old navy man and a key Sukarnoist soldier. AM Hanafi was a former marine, a Sukarno loyalist, and in 1965 the Indonesian ambassador to Cuba. He chose to remain in exile after Suharto gained power. His 1998 book accusing Suharto of having conducted a coup d'etat did not receive wide attention (except on the internet), partly because it was published in France, and partly because the same author had published a pro-Suharto book only two years earlier.

More important was the defence speech of Abdul Latief, an infantry commander in Jakarta in 1965 and also a Sukarnoist. He was arrested on 11 October 1965 but not sentenced until 1978. After suffering terrible privations he was finally released on 25 March 1999. A copy of his defence speech had been circulating in photocopied form since 1980, so those in the know were not surprised when the document published in Jakarta in May 2000 accused Suharto not just of deviousness in exploiting the course of events but of complicity in the murder of the generals itself.

Other military insiders still alive and with stories to tell about the bloody events that saw in the New Order have thus far chosen to remain silent. They include Kemal Idris, Yoga Sugama, Andi Yusuf, Sudharmono, Benny Murdani, and Mursyid.

Foreign authors whose work on the 1965-66 killings was long ignored in mainstream Indonesia have now appeared in translation. They include Harold Crouch on the military in politics with a detailed chapter on 1965, and Saskia Wieringa on the communist women's organisation Gerwani. The New Order's xenophobia gone, Indonesian commentators felt free to collaborate with foreigners who would once have been described as 'anti-Indonesian'. Books by Geoffrey Robinson and Robert Cribb on the killings of 1965-66 were often quoted, as was an Indonesian translation published in Malaysia of a book by the British leftist imprisoned by Suharto, Carmel Budiardjo. Two American editors worked with Indonesian authors to write a lavishly illustrated popular history of the New Order that included chapters on militarism, indoctrination and corruption.

Other books soon to be published in Indonesia about the massacres of 1965-66 include one by Hermawan Sulistyo on the killings in Jombang (East Java), and one by I G Krisnadi about the political prisoners on Buru Island. Unlike earlier books in this genre, such as the memoirs of imprisoned Sukarno-era cabinet minister Oei Tjoe Tat , these books will not be banned.

Some of those making revelations had themselves a violent military background and could be accused of being of a kind with Suharto.

Sergeant-Major Boengkoes, for example, led the soldiers who murdered a general on the night of 30 September 1965, and so should not be seen as a prisoner of conscience. The fact that upon his release he was lionised on the Jakarta caf� circuit is a little worrisome.

The same could not be said of Ibu Sulami, long-imprisoned former secretary-general of the communist women's organisation Gerwani. Active in women's movements since late colonial times, she was arrested by the military early in 1967. She was horribly tortured, and only sentenced in 1975. International pressure helped release most political prisoners by 1979, but she was not let out until 1984. In April 1999 she and some other ex-political prisoners set up an organisation to recover the historical truth about the 1965-66 massacres, with a view to eventually laying charges of crimes against humanity. In the face of occasional harrassment, the group has held seminars on the history of 1965-66 that regularly make the news.

One of the Sulami group's first demands was to revoke as undemocratic the 1966 ban on communism brought down by the People's Consultative Assembly decree (Tap No 25/MPRS/1966MPRS). To the delight of democracy activists, the new President Abdurrahman Wahid took up this demand in March 2000. It was rejected out of hand by parliament in May - proving that Wahid was practically the only liberal figure in government - but it had been a valuable exercise in political education for the public, which according to the surveys remained fearful of 'the spectre of communism'.

Another significant educational effort was the film on 1965 by Indonesia's best-known active filmmaker Garin Nugroho. Puisi tak terkuburkan ('Unburiable poetry') shows a few days in the life of a prison cell in Aceh in 1965, where condemned leftists await execution. It was funded from overseas and did not make the commercial cinemas, but was widely reviewed nonetheless.

A compassionate discourse on the healing importance of remembering the dark 1965-66 tragedy has, for the first time, become regular fare in the better print media. A chapter on 'victims' by feminist Karlina Leksono-Supelli in a thick end-of-millenium historical volume, a column on 'remembering' by political analyst Kusnanto Anggoro, and by the young scholar Budiawan, and by the popular short story writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, all opened up new horizons of civil discourse on what was once the greatest of taboos.

Together, these ongoing efforts will make it difficult for the military to re-establish the kind of regime that Suharto built except by abandoning, Burma-style, any attempt at political legitimation. A series of concessions on what constituted the truths of national history portrayed an only partially reformed post-Suharto state, but one whose hegemony was fractured. President Habibie continued to lead the 1 October Hari Kesaktian Pancasila ceremony in honour of the murdered generals at Lubang Buaya in 1998 and 1999, just as Suharto had done since 1966. But in 1999, 154 members of parliament belonging to the PDI-P refused to attend, saying it was time to 'desacralise' the day. His Information Minister Yunus Yosfiah had already cancelled the order to broadcast the propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI in 1998 (apparently the air force had told him they objected to the role in which it cast them). Nevertheless, a less bloodthirsty anti-communist film was still broadcast in its stead. Also in ideological retreat, Habibie's Education Minister Juwono ordered changes to the school history text books in five areas: the 1945 birth of Pancasila, the 1 March 1949 Yogyakarta attack, the 30 September 1965 event, the 11 March 1966 Supersemar letter, and the 1976 'integration' of East Timor into Indonesia. To those hoping for a complete overhaul, this looked like a piecemeal agenda. It left out many important issues, such as the role of leftists in Indonesia's revolutionary history generally, or the meaning of the 1950s - its parliamentary democracy and its regional revolts.

Moreover neither Juwono nor his replacement Yahya Muhaimina promised to invigorate history teaching out of the usual rote model. The rewriting was being coordinated by departmental historian Anhar Gonggong, whose publication record included the history of East Timor that so angered Antero Benedito da Silva in the opening quote of this article. However, it was perhaps a start.

Towards a new national historiography?

Breaking historical taboos after the fall of Suharto was by no means confined to exposing the evils of his regime's birth in blood. In a nationalist historiography of great men, biographies are important. New biographies appeared of figures that the New Order had consistently demonised. Some belonged to the religious right. Kartosuwiryo was executed in 1962 for having led an Islamic rebellion in West Java for fifteen years.

In some religious student circles during the New Order he was revered as the model 'radical Muslim'. In 1999 not one but two biographies of him appeared celebrating him as the 'proclamator of the Indonesian Islamic State'.

On the left there are now new books about (or reprinted books by) Semaun, Tan Malaka, and Marco Kartodikromo, all late colonial communists whose names were never even mentioned in public during the New Order.

That the left has been more active in reoccupying the post-authoritarian historiographical imagination is largely due to the towering talent of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This man was already a major novelist when Suharto's military arrested him soon after 1 October 1965 for belonging to the leftist literary group Lekra. Somehow amidst the privations of his fourteen years on the penal island of Buru, he managed to write, and write prodigiously. Much of his writing was historically inspired. The Buru works were smuggled out (some remain lost until today) and published overseas. New Order Indonesia routinely banned them - until the regime collapsed in May 1998. Today his Jakarta publisher is producing one best seller after another as it struggles to keep up with demand for reprints of his older work as well as for Buru books that are seeing the light for the first time.

During the New Order, many read Pramoedya's historical work as a veiled attack on Suharto's militarism, but it will prove to be much more enduring and universal than that. Space does not suffice to do justice to its sheer scale. His first tetralogy, named after its first title Bumi manusia ('This earth of mankind'), was a reinterpretation of the origins of Indonesian nationalism in which he gave a major place to leftist and nternationalist influences (including the 1911 Chinese Revolution). Sang pemula ('The initiator') is an original biography of a key figure in this early movement, the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo. President Abdurrahman Wahid once declared Bumi manusia, which describes Tirto Adhi Soerjo in fictionalised form, to be among the two best novels in Indonesian.

The next tetralogy, named after its third title Arus balik ('Return current'), remains incomplete and has not yet been translated. Its dramatic stage is not the early twentieth century but the pre-colonial East Javanese

kingdoms of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE. Perhaps along the lines of the Lekra project of the 1950s, these historical novels reinterpret the popular legends of these kingdoms in a determinedly democratic, egalitarian spirit. Gone is the feudal sub-text that even today underlies popular performances (ketoprak) or television serials of these stories, in which kings inherently have divine right on their side. Instead the kings are portrayed as ruthless Machiavellian operators, who face resistance from strong figures arising from the common people.

In his old age he has addressed the 1945 revolution, bringing out a two-volume chronicle that apparently aims to re-include long-neglected social forces, leftists I suppose, in the dynamic history of this period,

however without engaging in a polemic.

All Pramoedya's stories are all filled with strong, authentic individuals. He once said: 'I think history is important. It is a house from which people go out to travel the world. If they don't know where they came from, they won't understand their destination.' History held no interest for him as a justification for any political regime. Its only purpose, he seemed to be saying, was to make those who contemplate it better individuals.

In the present juncture, probably only bravely democratic thinking like this can save Indonesian historiography for the national imagination. The deceits of the New Order may have gone so deep that little remains to inspire the thought that Indonesia is still a worthwhile project. The opening chapter of the end-of-millenium volume Seribu tahun Nusantara reflected this pessimism when it said the project was now nothing but 'a heap of delusions'.

By no means all the local histories that have emerged in recent years have an anti-national character. There is a genre of historical novels and biographies that celebrate regional 'contributions' to the Indonesian nation. Cities around the country have taken to celebrating their 'birthdays' with considerable fanfare. Exactly how the precise year of birth is calculated is not always clear, but the historical snippets local newspapers carry connect the city with what its inhabitants know about national history. When President Habibie gave the South Sulawesi city of Ujung Pandang back its historical name of Makassar in October 1999, he was counting on local pride feeding into his national reelection campaign. Museums devoted to local history and culture often play the same nationally integrating function.

However, other historical claims now being heard in the regions definitely do have an anti-national character, or rather they reinterpret the concept 'nation' such that the region becomes the nation. These 'sub-national' claims to nationhood-with-a-history are formulated in much the same way as the national history they challenge - they are strong on sacred dates, great men, and legal milestones. The one big difference is that the colonial master to be heroically resisted is now not the Netherlands but Indonesia.

Like the Indonesian history, the histories of Papua and Aceh are written by elites aspiring to power. But unlike the jaded feelings that the national history now evokes in so many of its readers, these rival accounts appear to enjoy the enthusiastic assent of great numbers of ordinary people who feel there the promise of recognition at last.

We do not yet know a great deal about these accounts. More research will show us who creates them, how they are disseminated, and how much resistance there is to their myth-making.

Hasan di Tiro is a mysterious man who has lived in Sweden in a kind of double exile for decades. He has not been in Aceh since 1979, and some whisper that he left the United States, where his son and estranged wife still live, because of a business conflict. In interviews he likes to bring out an old letter from 'my friend' Ed Lansdale, the Cold War CIA operative who is notorious for his psy-war record in Vietnam and the Philippines. Yet the armed Free Aceh Movement (AGAM) accords him almost superhuman status as Father of the Nation (Wali Negara). He turns 70 in September 2000.

Hasan di Tiro's political manifesto is contained in The unfinished diary of Tengku Hasan di Tiro, which recounts a two year and five month sojourn as leader of a clandestine movement in the Aceh mountains from late 1976 to early 1979. The book is filled with claims drawn from the exemplary past.

In a curious post-colonial fashion, it took several key statements about the Acehnese nation and its character from early twentieth century Dutch authors.

The argument consists of two parts. One is that the Dutch fought the Acehnese nation but never defeated it. Aceh consequently retains its sovereignty - over against the Netherlands and therefore also over against the colonial successor state of Indonesia. The other is that his own family connections with the most prominent figures in the Acehnese war against the Dutch make him the natural inheritor of Aceh's leadership. 'The family of the Tengku di Tiro is the holiest family that Acheh has ever recognised', he quotes (p4) from a 1925 book by Zentgraaff (without mentioning that this author had at the time a white supremacist reputation). A genealogy (p140) traces the connections.

On 4 December 1976 the small group declared Acehnese independence by solemnly raising a flag in the forest at Tjokkan Hill. It was the day in 1911, Hasan di Tiro said, that the Dutch shot dead the last 'Head of State', Tengku Tjhik Maat di Tiro ('my uncle') in Alue Bhot (p14).

On 10 March 1977 Hasan di Tiro issued a new calendar. It combined sacred Islamic dates with commemmorations of great battles in the 1873-1911 war against the Dutch (literally all of which, he stressed, were fought by his relatives). The only exception to this fascination with the Aceh war is December 27, remembered as the day in 1639 when Sultan Iskandar Muda died, whom many Acehnese honour as personifying the ideal model of Acehnese statehood. None of the dates, incidentally, suggested he was interested in the 1950s Darul Islam revolt against Indonesia led by Daud Beureuh.

Hasan di Tiro had oil interests in the US before he began the guerrilla campaign. He was acutely aware that the recently discovered Arun field was 'the richest natural gas field in the world' (p105). But worldly interests such as hydrocarbons or the details of political power rarely disturbed the sustained romanticism of his diary.

Amid mounting Indonesian army counter-insurgency operations in the second half of 1978, he began writing a historical play entitled The drama of Acehnese history 1873-1978. It was later finished by his closest lieutenant, Husaini Hasan (pp186, 201, 220), and apparently still circulates in Aceh. On 29 March 1979, telling comrades he was going to buy arms, he slipped out of the closing Indonesian noose and out of the country.

Hasan di Tiro's supporters in Stockholm have produced an entire historiography of Acehnese nationalism. It begins with the autonomy of the Islamic Samudra-Pasai kingdom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries over against the Indonesian precursor kingdoms (so depicted in the national historiography) of Sriwijaya and Majapahit. It then goes on to recount Acehnese resistance against the Portuguese and the far more devious Dutch, and closes by pointing out that the (federal) United States of Indonesia of 1950, which ended the Indonesian war for independence, did not include Aceh.

Admittedly this historiography originates in Sweden and circulates mainly on the internet, but Hasan di Tiro's argument has also been aired in Aceh's mainstream print media.

Taking their cue from this (sub-)nationalist version of Acehnese history, a small group of Acehnese students occupied the grounds of the Dutch embassy in Jakarta for three days in August 1999 to underline their demand that the Dutch government should withdraw its formal 'declaration of war against the sultan of Aceh on 26 March 1873', and hence acknowledge Acehnese sovereignty. As an ambit claim it was unlikely to fly, but it was perhaps the first time that some Indonesians had publicly turned the usual argument on its head that Jakarta had spoken for all Indonesians when it signed an agreement to end hostilities with the Netherlands in 1949.

The students were probing a distinct weak spot in the nationalist myth that all resistance to the Dutch had been 'Indonesian' and not Acehnese, Javanese, Makasarrese or Ambonese. After all, if anti-colonial resistance was the yardstick of legitimacy, as it is in the mythology, who was to say which was the more legitimate - resistance in the 1870s by an Acehnese sultanate with a long history of international recognition, or resistance in the 1940s by Indonesians with no history except that of colonial collaboration? The students did not pursue the argument in quite such ruthless terms, but the backward-looking appeal to the sultanate was characteristic of much post-Suharto legitimation discourse, and not only in Aceh. 'The way we fight is to reclaim the triumphs of Acehnese history, from the time of Sultan Iskandar Muda [1607-36],' one armed Acehnese fighter told the foreign press.

At the other end of the country, Papuan independence activists similarly turned to history as an important tool in their fight. The large Second Papuan People's Congress held in Jayapura 29 May-4 June 2000 (the first one being in 1961) took as its theme 'Let us straighten out the history of West Papua'. This congress followed a series of conferences and a book with similar themes.

The main argument was that Papuans had never belonged to the Indonesian nationalist movement, indeed that Indonesians had been as colonial towards Papuans as had been the Dutch. If Papua had been part of the precursor Majapahit kingdom at all (through its vassal the Tidore sultanate) it was as a mere tributary to a tributary. Papua had a different, evidently less destructive memory of Dutch colonialism than did Indonesia. Several of Indonesia's key founding fathers such as Hatta had argued in August 1945 that Papua did not belong to Indonesia, and they had all agreed with the Dutch in 1949 to exclude Papua from their borders. The transition after 1962 to Indonesian rule ('invasion'), culminating in the 1969 so-called Act of Free Choice (Pepera), had been a farce whose plot was written by the world's great powers and in which Papuans had played no part. Papua's subsequent history under Indonesian rule had been one of oppression and exploitation.

The key event in Papua's nationalist history was a flag-raising ceremony on 1 December 1961. The flag had stayed there, next to the United Nations flag, until Indonesian soldiers took it down on Sukarno's orders on 1 May 1963.

The 1961 occasion, in fact conducted with the encouragement of the colonial Dutch, is remembered today as the declaration of Papuan independence.

Flag-raising ceremonies on this day these last two years have always been marked with expositions of the Papuan history described above, by way of political education. 'Papua has been independent since 1 December 1961.

History proves it', Great Papuan Leader Theys Eluay told Papuan and foreign delegations alike at the Papuan People's Congress. Judging by the number of times it was invoked, this event was almost the main symbolic focus of the congress. In an eschatological sense perhaps more familiar to Christians than others, the 'not yet' had become an 'already' in that flag-raising of 1961.

The central state did put up resistance to these militant new historiographies, but to true believers it must have seemed ineffectual indeed. An Indonesian magazine said Hasan di Tiro was lying when he claimed to have the blue blood of the heroic anti-Dutch fighter Cik di Tiro in his veins - he was no more than a peasant's son. In Papua, the military tried holding their own seminar series to 'straighten out history' - it was important, the presiding colonel said, to avoid national disintegration by stressing that Papuans had also fought for integration with Indonesia in the 1960s. The governor of Papua, Freddy Numberi, adopted a more daring, theological approach. 'The God we worship in Jesus Christ is the Lord of history', he said. 'World history and all of human life are never free from His hand. We must be open to accept the will of the Lord for this land as it came to expression in the history of the Act of Free Choice, which made Irian Jaya an inseparable part of the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia.. Let us obey the Lord who owns and controls all human history, including that of this land. Let us not reject the will of the Lord and impose our own will.' What his hearers thought about this piece of theological prostitution is not recorded.

The new histories of Aceh and Papua written in 1999 differed sharply from each other in some respects. Where the Acehnese appealed to a long history of Acehnese independence, Papuans narrowed their focus to the defining moment of a flag-raising ceremony in 1961 (one that had been sponsored by their previous colonisers at that). However, each problematised the hitherto widely accepted version of Indonesian nationalist history in ways that many Acehnese and Papuans apparently found persuasive, and that the centre found difficult to counter in its accustomed hegemonic manner.

'Straightening out history' is not a term many historians prefer, even if they also do not like the extreme scepticism of the postmodernists. It's prevalence in recent Indonesian discourse tells us that history here has an importance far beyond the control of historians. Historical myth-making has always been an important facet of modern nationalism, and provided it is conducted in a dialogical manner it is not always indefensible. But the state-nationalism of which Suharto's New Order was an example turned that myth-making against its own citizens in a particularly violent and sectarian manner.

The end of the New Order has exposed the hollowness of that non-inclusive mythology for all Indonesians to see. It has permitted a great variety of new national and sub-national histories to emerge. Some of these, especially if they can win the ear of educational elites in an only very partially reformed state, have the potential of restoring some sense of inclusive Indonesian equanimity. Others, no doubt more familiar with the well-worn techniques of mobilising a population using 'national' myths, are writing militant sub-national histories as a weapon in their regional struggle against Jakarta. Nor do they lack listeners.

The present times offer an opportunity and a challenge for historical talent in Indonesia. The opportunity lies in writing more human histories that respond creatively and positively to the new hopes alive within Indonesian society. The challenge is to resist new forms of hegemonic knowledge - not only from the central state but also from regional movements adopting state-forming strategies.